letters from isolation

Non-violence and letters from jail

      The open-ness of a question falls into our laps with infinities of possibility.  What will we scrawl into the open minds of children?  What mirror will they see?  Will our language teach them to create worlds, or accept false worlds?  What we put on the page, or the blog, or the book has the force of the Torah.  If we are so chosen by powers outside ourselves, so to communicate, in the glory of time, by vigil or morning, we too might be writing the disaster, or the letter from a jail. Writing is not to be taken lightly. Nor reading, nor speaking.
    Ahimsa, nonviolence, is threefold.  In thought, word, and deed might (non)violence occur.  Could we call anyone any which way, but petal, and dearest, saint, revered other?  Or liar, rapist, the damned? Could we say any way to justice? Can evil be spoken?  Is it banal? Is it, at all? Is there such a thing possible?  My defense attorney friend saw that there was no crime within the bounds of sanity.  We are all not guilty by reason of insanity.  For that moment of abrogation of human rights, is a moment of rupture from the good, the buddha-nature, the inner light contained within all beings.  So if in the moment of rupture: murder, hatred, violence, self-harm----a person could be caught, like a bird, fluttering and afraid, and calmed to a point of reason/peace, could we nonviolently transform????
    As i poured over thorazine’s curse, programming lessons with my brother, pondering exile, chemical straightjackets, coup d’etats, suicided film-makers, murdered film-makers, lobotomized journalists, braindamaged beaten fingerless bloggers, and meditated on an oral tradition of a digital hyperreality, it might be as in a dream the answer occurs.  The monk appears to say “everything will happen before you die.”  And this is no genocide studies class.  But to wake in the morning refreshed and hungry for wikipedia’s hidden genocides, herero namaqua, hungry for a human sound, like the muffled echo over time in the heating vent in the solitary cell, might then we allow the powers of speech beyond speech, the powers of mind. Or bones calligraphies koans to make.
    I feel them, the minds calling through the isolation chambers, the torture tanks.  I feel the boats at the coast, sent back to eternal diaspora. chernobyl, hiroshima.  I dream of the oil drenched birds.
    In Himsa theory, the harm in mind, enacts real molecular destruction on the silent prey.  Words uttered, written even, have power of sacred texts to transform nations, destroy spirits, stop hearts.  And then in sounds, sonorous sounds, come healing.  And time so quick, in a life ended at thirty seven, in the time of the assassins, to repeat: “MLK” as the only bright spot on a dreary morning, a hero as we pass the petrol highway, the infinite cruelties of forgetfulness . . . a spell, a hero, a mantra, to say and to utter a name like a prayer, a hero, of hoping . . . MLK . . to awake from malaise . . . of theo van gogh and submission . . .
    And in the Jain way, there will be no taking of life in the future.  As hunker we down to tiptoe the land for fear of the insect life, and harm, ahimsa will have new ways of being, like in the morning of august, a time when i felt understanding, in a neon sun haze, in a chemical lie, with st. john’s wort and friendship.  There will be fruits and nuts but no harm done to any animal and nonviolence will permeate every spoken word.  No words will main, divide, officiate the false binaries.  Every word will be spoken for human liberation and against death, death which is a virtue, to lay down and starve peacefully, hurting nothing, no one, maiming no one with words.
    So as up we rise from the perfection of repose, we will choose words more carefully, lest they inflict pain.  As life was suffering already without more pain.  And there will be liberators, doctors who take pain away.  And Eichmann in Jerusalem might be saved to speak the darkest secrets of the darkest realms, so we may know the depths of man’s inhumanity.  And as the rapist condemns his victim to life, so justice will condemn the living to life and the dead to dying, for pain will last afterlifes in the spiritbodies of our words and laws.
    So the letters from jail are all the letters of civilization, as existence gives itself to speech, and utterance, after the disaster.  To write in thrall, in slavery, was the servitude of scribomaniacs.  As Maurice Blanchot spoke of the writing imperative, it is with words to witness . . .